


Queen's Gambit

by AJHall



Series: The Queen of Gondal [4]
Category: Gondal - Bronte children, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, See series description., Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-31
Updated: 2011-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:05:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the shore at Aulis to the palace in Gaaldine, to be a princess is to be a sacrifice.</p><p>In a remote country residence Master Ripley, a physician famed for his knowledge of frenzy and melancholia, tends a distraught woman broken by the ruthless dynastic politics of her House.   The unexpected arrival of her kinsman the Crown Prince is a catalyst which forces Ridley to recognise the brooding evil at the root of his patient's malady, a curse which has poisoned the lives of four generations and which sits so close to the Crown that treason itself ceases to be a relevant consideration.</p><p>Meanwhile, death, fire and destruction creep inland from the sea, and the wind is changing.</p><p>A downloadable ebook version of this can be found <a href="http://ajhall.shoesforindustry.net/ebooks/37/ajhall_queens_gambit/"> here </a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Genia's full name is Iphigenia, and should be pronounced Je-NY-ah, not JEAN-eye-ah.
> 
> This is probably the darkest work in the series; things do get lighter in due course.
> 
> Vary many thanks to caulkhead for betaing

  
_You are only pretty if you disappear_  
And you must be beautiful for them my dear  
Whatever before you wanted to achieve  
Is lost to this love to turn to fallen leaves  
The fallen leaves that cover everything  
Must lie together all in your eyes  
Then you can live among the privileged  
Oh but don't appear to be more than mine

Eliza Carthy, _Fallen Leaves_

"No." Sherlock spun on one booted heel. "That is profoundly – unfair."

The King-his-brother raised a predictably sardonic eyebrow. "You think so?"

Sherlock bit back his instinctive challenge. "Ten months – is hardly any time at all."

"Ten months is far longer than any court can be expected to restrain itself from gossip. Well? Is there any hope I can offer my interlocutors concerning the imminence of an heir for the combined kingdoms of Gondal and Gaaldine?'

"Gondal is currently adjusting to the rule of the Pretender. Many of its people , if not happy about that fact, at least accept it for the moment. We may – with great good luck on our part and some misjudgement on his – be able to dislodge him in the next few months. This is no time to be indulging in – distractions."

"Distractions? An odd way for a prince to consider the dynastic demands of his House."

"An area in which you are so notoriously expert," Sherlock snapped.

Mycroft's face went an ashy mud shade. Before he could speak, Sherlock raised a hand. "No. Consider that unsaid. In fact – if you wish me to lead another mission to the Pope –"

"Delicate diplomatic negotiations with churchmen being so conspicuously your forte." The King was ascendant once more; Mycroft's momentary lapse into showing his feelings gone as if it had never been. "I am already mired in complications as a result of your summary actions in Brendelhame. The Duke of Corbisdale is on the point of breaking openly with the Crown over the treatment of his kinsman the Bishop.."

"The Duke's been a hair's breadth from treason for the last five years. If your agent in Brendelhame had had a modicum of competence we might have been able to link him to the team who tried to snatch Charis."

"That agent has been removed from his post and returned to the capital for questioning." Mycroft pursed his lips. "Contrary to popular belief, I, too, do not take kindly to direct threats to my close kin."

"And if your man turns out to have been bought by the Duke? An open breach might be in all our interests. At least we would know where we stood."

"Between the Northern Marches in flame, and the Pretender's troops pouring across the Gaaldine border? It may yet come to that. But I would prefer to defer the moment if we could."

Sherlock nodded, little caring if Mycroft took the gesture for agreement or mere acquiescence. "Since you are clearly weighed down by matters of state, I'll take my leave. If the hordes of Gondal are set to descend down the Pass of the Eagles then Castle Cavron needs to be in a fit state to withstand them." He bowed, formally, and withdrew.

He ordered his guard to accompany him north at once. With a couple of exceptions, all were men who had been with him for years. Accordingly, when two miles along the road he gave the order to turn east down narrow tracks through the forest, they responded with resignation but no surprise.

The old tracks had become overgrown and the foresters had cut different ones since last he'd come that way. Still, his sense of direction never deserted him. They emerged onto the great eastern road little more than half a mile from where he'd intended. The party rode on, into the little town where the locals looked part-fearful, part-resigned at this incursion of armed men. They would have passed through unstopping but Sherlock saw the hooded figure leaning against the angle of the wall just before the bridge and held his hand up, calling his troop to a halt.

"Sir?" his captain enquired.

"Tell the men they may take a short break at the inn, provided they hold themselves ready to ride at a moment's notice. I need to talk to that man."

"Sir!" The captain glanced sideways, towards the immobile, shabby-cloaked figure. "I'm responsible for your safety."

"I know him. He's no threat to me." Not true at all, but nothing the captain could protect him from, to a certainty. "Go with the men. I'll join you shortly."

"Sir." Plainly unhappy, the captain rounded up the men and withdrew. Sherlock approached the hooded figure.

"I rode north," he began, without preamble.

"You always do." Mycroft pushed his hood up a little. "You took longer to get here than I'd expected."

"Your royal foresters have changed the tracks. You know, my captain was horrified at leaving me alone with you. God alone knows what the head of Palace security would think of you, out here, without any guard at all."

"I'm not planning to tell him. Are you?"

"Not if you stop pushing about Charis."

There was a pause. Mycroft sighed. "Believe me, if I didn't stand between you and those who push _me_ –" His voice changed. "When you reach your destination, give her this. Please."

He reached inside his robe and produced a small velvet bag. The scent of crushed gorse flowers rose from it. Sherlock took it, slid it inside his jerkin, and nodded.

"Any message?"

"What on earth would be the point?" His brother's face creased into the familiar lines of an old pain. Sherlock acknowledged it with a careful jerk of his chin. Mycroft felt inside his robe again, producing a letter sealed with his personal cipher.

"Give this to Ripley."

"The new physician? What's he like?"

"Like all of them. He has theories."

"As you said, then. Like them all."

"Still, notwithstanding his theories, he is conscientious. And there's a rich vein of compassion in there, if one digs deep enough. Given what I've seen, I'll settle for that."  
Almost unconsciously, Sherlock's hand went to grip his brother's arm. The King moved, so the gesture fell between them, uncompleted. "Go. "

The troop had taken his warning to heart; their beer had been poured into their own leather tankards, the ones from their packs, for speed of departure. One or two were still brushing foam from their lips when he gathered them round him once more.

"Gentlemen. As you will have gathered by now, we are not heading directly to Castle Cavron. Our destination is the Residence at Alwentdale."

An armsmen at the back – one of the new ones – let out an insufficiently stifled gasp of shock. Sherlock singled out the man in question with his eye.

"Yes, I ride to visit my sister the Queen. You have a view to express?"

The armsman almost choked. With the faintest possible inclination of his head, he indicated that no, nothing could be further than his thoughts than to question his Prince's decision.

"To horse, then."


	2. Chapter 2

Ripley looked at the cloud of dust – _no bigger than a baby's head_ – advancing along the road towards the Residence. He turned in consternation to the guard captain.

"You're joking."

The captain shook his head. "I've little doubt of it, sir. The road leads only to the Residence and that's an armed escort of a dozen or so. An important man's escort. We're in for a visitation." His face had a grim good humour which belied his words.

Ripley's skin crawled. "But – I had no warning –"

The captain's smile deepened. "Not been in the service of the Family long, sir, I take it? Warnings aren't their style. Take all the fun out of it, I s'pose."

"Is that my brother approaching?"

The sudden manifestation of a black-clad presence by his left elbow took Ripley – as ever – by surprise. Bare feet made no sound on stone. Her hair hung in elf-locks down her back; the tattered edges of her black silk gown whispered along the ramparts.

The back of the captain's hand brushed the smooth flags as he bowed. "Very like, your grace. We will know in less than a turn of the glass."

She nodded, clutching the small grey cat close below her chin. Ripley had almost broken his neck tripping over it on the stair yesterday and suspected, from the baleful look in its yellow eyes, that it still held a grudge.

"I shall be in my chambers. Tell my brother I shall be pleased to receive him when he has refreshed himself after the fatigues of his journey." At Ripley's discreet signal the two attendants, who had been hovering a few yards away, eying the drop to the river below, came up to flank the Queen, all deferential curtseys and soothing words. She smiled, distantly, like an intelligent child who hears adult dissimulation and is not fooled by it, and suffered herself to be led below.

"Her brother? But –" Ripley came to a halt. A letter from the Earl had arrived only that morning. It lay among the papers in his study; its words were engraved on his heart.

 _My sister, out in the hayfields, doing a labourer's task? Insupportable. Her condition is degradation enough – let me hear of no further parade of it before the common folk._

But she laughed, Riley protested to the unseen Earl. Swinging a pitchfork, helping to bring in a load of hay before the oncoming thunder wrecked it, vivid and alive against the racing edge of storm-clouds, one among a line of villagers, her bare feet unremarkable in that ragged company.

Until she had come across the half-rotten corpse of a leveret, its throat ripped out by fox or weasel, and Ripley had found her crouched over it, her knuckles crammed into her mouth, immobile and unseeing.

"The Earl gave me no warning in his latest letter," Ripley protested.

The captain favoured him with a look which was almost pitying. "Her grace referred to _her brother_. Had she meant the Earl, I – ah – daresay she'd have used a different expression."

"Really? What?"

"She uses barrack language, sir. To describe the Earl. Always. I don't think that's her condition, if you're wondering, sir. Though maybe it frees her tongue a little."

 _If one wishes to understand the overthrow of reason, always look to the family. That is where most imbalances in the humours have their root._

No point in recalling old medical manuscripts now. Not with a crisis on his hands. Any visitation from the families of his patients always spelt trouble, enhanced distress for the patients, a distress which persisted long after the relative in question had departed again. But with this patient –

Routine and a firmly constrained admixture of physical labour were the key planks in Ripley's treatment plan. He held to them or he abandoned the case. No exceptions, no matter how eminent the patient. The Earl's letter, unwelcome as it was, was no more than he had come to expect from his patients' kin.

But if this was not the Earl –

"By the Queen's brother – you mean her husband's brother, the Crown Prince?"

The guard captain nodded. "He makes a point of visiting three or four times a year. We expected him weeks ago but I daresay the King of Gondal dying put a crimp in his plans."

However much Ripley prided himself on cultivating stoicism, his stomach cramped. A personal visit from the Crown Prince, a man who rumour claimed was detested in court circles, his private life food for scurrilous gossip, his arrogance legendary, his vengeance against those who crossed his will terrifying and inevitable – a man would be an idiot not to find an implicit threat in that.

And yet the guard captain's demeanour – respectful, a little on edge, but no more than any conscientious officer might be at a surprise inspection from headquarters – told a rather different story.

A little over a turn of the glass later, Ripley remained baffled. The Crown Prince was a far cry from the foppish, haughty lord he had expected. He moved like a hunting wild-cat, wearing his unadorned trooper's gear like a second skin. His hair was cut startlingly short, emphasising the sharp planes of his head. And those extraordinary eyes – pale, changeable, missing nothing. In shape, colour, setting so like another pair of eyes Ripley knew well; so different as to the spirit which moved behind them.

"Our grandmothers were sisters," the Crown Prince said, the first words he had spoken.

Ripley shivered. He had seen villagers make the sign against ill-luck behind the Queen's back and shaken his head over the superstitious folly of the ignorant, who conflated magic with madness; who took the overthrow of the seat of reason as the evidence of demonic possession. In his pride he had overlooked the possibility that those simple folk might know more than he did.

"Only accurate observation of your reactions, not necromancy." The Crown Prince's eyes glittered with amusement. "Though it's a suggestion I have heard before….I am charged to give you this."

He produced a letter sealed with the King's personal cipher, a courtesy Ripley had not expected (the Earl always used his formal seal, that appropriate for stewards and other underlings senior enough to require his personal attention, but only as if distanced by tongs).

"Well," Ripley said, having perused it, "may I take you to her grace?"

"Once I have washed and changed. She is, after all, the Queen of Gaaldine. I would not insult her by coming into her presence still filthy from the road."

He flashed a mercurial smile and was gone.  
………..  
When one of the prince's men tapped at Ripley's study door to intimate that the Crown Prince was ready to see the Queen, Ripley found the Crown Prince in an icily perfect black velvet doublet with starched lace collar. The freshwater pearls stitched around its edge echoed the single lustrous earring that he wore.

Ripley found his thoughts running once more to sorcery. He had no idea how otherwise the Crown Prince could have contrived such an effect from the contents of his saddlebags in the time available.

"Come," the Crown Prince said. He led the way to the Queen's suite at a pace that forced Ripley to scurry to keep up, making him feel flustered and faintly ridiculous in consequence. Somehow, Ripley rather suspected that was the point.

The Crown Prince knocked, precisely, on the Queen's door; two sharp raps, a pause, and then three more. After a second or so a terrified little figure whom Ripley recognised as the newest and youngest of the attendants opened the door.

As ever, Ripley's breath caught in his throat as the cold, close air of the room – a mixture of dust and candlewax, incense and decay – drifted out onto the passageway. He had known other visitors turn faint on that threshold, put scented handkerchiefs to their lips, make faltering excuses not to pass through.

The Crown Prince entered unhesitatingly, turning slightly to his left as he did so. There was a niche there, partly curtained behind a tapestry, a superb piece of work but one of which few details could be discerned in the dim light. As he passed, the Crown Prince dropped a graceful, crook-kneed bow, something between a genuflexion and a nobleman's greeting to close kin of higher rank. Sweat prickled on the back of Ripley's neck.

The attendant lady retreated to her seat in the single shaft of daylight, and picked up her needlework again. Ahead of him, the Crown Prince side-stepped; even alerted by his movement Ripley almost tripped over the cat. The skinny black one with the torn ear, he noted resentfully as it snarled at him. It was almost invisible in the gloom, so how the hell had the Crown Prince spotted it?

A shift amid the shadows betrayed the presence of the Queen. The Crown Prince bowed low, raising her hand to his lips and kissing it.

"What have you done to your hair?" Her voice was thin and fluting, almost that of a child.

"I had a fever. They shaved it off. And you?"

"Me?"

Before Ripley could cry a warning, the Crown Prince reached his hand out to stroke the Queen's pale cheek, winding one of her tangled black curls around his forefinger as he did so. His voice was very gentle.

"You've been neglecting yourself again. Let me?"

She gave a tiny, tense grunt of acquiescence, almost as if against her will.

The Crown Prince raised his head and looked at the attendant, who looked smaller than ever, cowered on her low stool, white linen strewn all around her.

"Bring my sister's combs. And sweet almond oil."

The attendant looked up in sheer horror. "But – your grace – my lord – sir –"

"For princes of the blood, 'your grace' on the first time of addressing them, 'sir' thereafter, 'your grace' or 'his grace' if you have to refer to them in speech; for nobles of lesser rank 'my lord', 'sir' and 'your' or 'his lordship' respectively." The Crown Prince's expression sharpened with malicious amusement. "Assume that the privilege of addressing the Earl of Alwent as 'shitface' is reserved to the Family alone."

The attendant flushed, struggled to her feet and managed a formal curtsey. She turned to the Queen. "Ma'am, am I -?"

"Do as my brother says, Lisbet," the Queen said, her tone weighed down with lassitude.

Neither the Crown Prince nor the Queen chose to break the silence which settled on the room following Lisbet's departure, meaning protocol fettered Ripley's tongue, also. Not protocol alone, though; the pervasive, whispering sense of unnumbered unseen cats stalking the chamber's shadows and, above all, those two tiny, silent, overwhelming presences in the curtained niche – _the bright hopes of Gaaldine, snuffed out almost before they were kindled_ – combined to produce a sense of oppression so deep that Ripley could almost have kissed Lisbet when her return broke their tableau.

Ripley watched out of the corner of his eye as the Crown Prince captured another low stool and dropped to sit by the Queen's left side, drawing a tangled mass of hair across his lap, and started to tease out the knots, humming slightly as he did so. The Queen's eyelids drooped; she relaxed into the touch.

The awkwardness of the Crown Prince's off-centred position – so different from that adopted by tiring maid or barber – caught and held Ripley's attention. There was something of importance there, surely; something which might allow him to unlock the dark, entwined morass of pain which lay as close beneath the Queen's skin as the web of blood vessels and nerves which an anatomist might expose.

Something of importance, there, if only he could decode it.

"They tell me you are married," the Queen said abruptly.

"Genia, I was married last time I came." The Crown Prince scrutinised a matted clump, pursed his lips and dipped the comb in oil. "I told you about the wedding."

"Did you? I don't recall."

"Not a surprise. I can hardly blame you for being less than inclined to take note of Court gossip, given your own – situation – at the time."

Ripley's heart accelerated. No-one here mentioned the name of the previous physician, a man famed throughout the three kingdoms for pioneering the Heroic Method of treatment of the melancholic and deranged. He was rumoured to be now in Angria, though Ripley had heard whispered hints of darker fates. At the hard, dangerous note in the Crown Prince's voice those rumours became startlingly easy to believe.

The Queen shrugged; a gesture of infinite resignation. "So, is your princess beautiful?"

"Charis? Not in the slightest."

Ripley heard a faint gasp of outrage from Lisbet. The Queen opened her eyes and turned her head towards the Crown Prince, an unholy, joyous light in her eyes.

"Oh, that's good. That's very good."

"Yes, isn't it?" The same mischievous gleam illuminated the Crown Prince's features. "I'm done here. Hold still a moment, while I move round to your other side. And tell those two tabbies crouched under your chair to keep their damned tails to themselves, or I'll tread on them without compunction."

He passed before the Queen's face, carrying his stool, and before he had taken up his position on the Queen's right side Ripley had it; the solution to a mystery which had not only baffled his predecessors (the great sheaf of notes in five or six different handwritings which he had inherited posited a score of theories for the Queen's violent aversion to having anyone touch her hair, head or neck) but which, now he knew the solution, seemed hardly a mystery at all. A child could have seen it.

He looked up straight into the eyes of the Crown Prince. The Crown Prince held his gaze for a moment, gave a small, satisfied, "Hah!" and then bent to his task once more.


	3. Chapter 3

Ripley and the Crown Prince had made five circuits of the river terrace in their after-dinner promenade, the evening dusk closing in, bats flitting in and out, feasting on the clouds of insects hovering about the water. Intent on his pipe, the Crown Prince had so far said nothing. After steeling himself for the last circuit and a half, Ripley finally broke the silence.

"Who was it, sir?"

"Not bad." A faint, malicious smile touched the Crown Prince's lips. "I once had a man walk beside me for fifteen turns before he plucked up the courage to tell me he'd had a stone in his shoe for the last ten of them. But you should frame your questions more precisely. I'm not a salmon to rise to a lure of feathers and artifice. Who was what?"

"Who tried to cut the Queen's throat?"

The Crown Prince paused, resting his hand on the low wall which divided the terrace from the river. He seemed intent on the other bank.

"Not the Queen's. The Princess Royal's." Ripley's face must have betrayed his bafflement because the Crown Prince frowned and added, "My mother's. And not tried. Succeeded."

Ripley just retrained himself from uttering a squeak of pure terror. He cast his mind frantically back. The Princess Royal had died when he'd been a mere boy, living far from the capital on the edge of a dusty little town in the southern provinces. He recalled rumour and counter-rumour swirling around the market-place, the servants by the laundry tubs whispering to each other, the shrill note in his mother's voice as she ssh-ed them. The old King's reign had been a golden age for spies and informers of all sorts; no man could be sure his household was free of them.   
"I had heard, sir," he said hesitantly, "that a – a Palace servant succumbed to a sudden fit of frenzy and that – the Princess Royal – your gracious mother – died as a result of the injuries he inflicted."

The Crown Prince blew a smoke-ring. His eyes were still fixed on the far bank.

"Not a servant, though that fact has never been widely known. A head of Palace Security who fails to protect his charges is apt – for whatever time is left to him – to be somewhat reticent about the details. And his successor, also, was keen to discourage imitators. And there were – other good and sufficient considerations urging discretion."

Ripley held his breath. He had been as good as told he was on the very brink of stumbling upon a State secret and any prudent man would do his damndest to ensure he came no closer. But if a chance of unlocking the Queen's melancholia had come to hand, who was he to turn down the chance simply for considerations of his own safety?

"Sir?" he ventured.

"You wish to hear more?" The Crown Prince turned his head, scrutinising Ripley as though he had for the first time become a matter of interest to him.

Mouth dry, Ripley nodded.

"You will – of course – have noted the old scar running along obliquely across the veins of my sister's left wrist."

There were numerous scars on the Queen's body. As her confidential physician Ripley could have drawn a topological map of them all. A story must lie behind each; he had been a fool to dismiss that on her wrist as something he knew without being told.

"Yes. All her previous physicians and several father confessors made that mistake, too." The Crown Prince seemed to be reading his thoughts again. "She told me once she'd endured so many penances for succumbing to the sin of despair that she'd earned any number of livelier sins _gratis_ , could she only summon up the energy to commit them."

"Would your grace be good enough to tell me more?"

The Crown Prince turned back to the river. "My mother was the ranking lady at court and barely thirty. Declaring oneself to be madly in love with her was the fashion of the day. No-one noticed that a certain young nobleman wasn't playing the same game as the rest. In fact, he wasn't playing at all."

"And he –"

"Bribed my mother's _friseur_ to take his place for an appointment in her chambers. Easy enough; courtiers were always filling her rooms with flowers or sending chamber orchestras to serenade beneath her windows or ambushing her with masques in intervals in progresses – God, it must have been so boring for her. Doubtless, when he dropped his combs and pomades to reveal himself, she started to trot out one of the pretty speeches she'd have made ready for such occasions."

He made something of a business of relighting his pipe, which had gone out.

"Only this time she wasn't dealing with a play-acting courtier after advancement, but a man convinced that the fates had decreed they should be together for all eternity. When he pulled out a razor, Genia was the only who reacted quickly enough to attempt to stop him. But she was only eight, and untrained. Never had a hope of disarming him – lucky he didn't sever the tendons of her wrist. My mother yelled at her to take me and run –"

"Holy Mary! You were _there_?" Belatedly Ripley added, "Sir."

The Crown Prince looked down at the two halves of the pipe-stem, broken by a sudden convulsion of those long fingers. "Damn. And that was a favourite, too. Yes. Though I can't recall – all I really recall is Genia making us hide in a privy. It took forever till the armsmen found us and it stank." His voice changed, "I'd tried to hide beneath my mother's skirts; Genia had to dive under the murderer's arm to pull me out. She must have been right below the main blood vessels when he slashed them. Her hair was matted solid with my mother's blood. I remember trying to comb it through, with my fingers, in the privy, in the afternoon heat and the stink, because I'd some confused idea that if I could only sort her hair out, everything would go back to how it had been before."

Ripley gulped. "I'm sorry, sir." It sounded wholly inadequate. He amplified. "Sorry, too, that those set to guard you failed you and your family so profoundly."

" _Dove è da notare che queste simili morti, le quali seguando per deliberazione d'uno animo ostinato, sono da' principi inevitabili, perché ciascuno che non si curi di moriri lo può offendere_ ," the Crown Prince murmured – a quotation, doubtless, but from no author Ripley had read, his Italian studies having been strictly confined to medical texts.

"I'm sorry?"

"Some risks can't be avoided, for all the care one takes. But don't go scampering after rabbits and forsake the true line."

He blinked. "Your grace?"

"I mean, because you've worked something out which your predecessors never thought to consider, doesn't mean you have solved everything. Or that you're on the brink of a miracle cure." His face looked bleak. "After all, the idea of a cure carries within it a certain set of assumptions, wouldn't you say? Though having come so far is – commendable."

The bands of fear which had constricted Ripley's chest ever since the guard captain had warned him of the Crown Prince's impending arrival slackened. The Crown Prince signalled a servitor and spoke a few low words. The servitor nodded and bustled off, returning a few minutes later with a crystal decanter full of brandy, a new pipe for the Crown Prince and two glasses. He gestured deferentially towards a lichened stone table and its attendant benches with lion-claw feet at the end of the terrace.

"So," the Crown Prince said, when they were seated and the brandy poured, "how does a physician of the mind set about his work? It's not as if you had rashes or inflammations upon which to base your diagnosis."

Explaining his specialism was fraught with peril. Madness was the great unknown; a great ball of speculation, myth, superstition and fear enclosing the tiniest fragment of empirical knowledge. That fragment was itself the subject of endless controversy among his professional brethren; a layman could have little hope of grasping anything of the matter's complexity. Still, the chance of gaining a sympathetic, intelligent supporter among the Queen's family should not be lightly forgone.

"There are common features in frenzy or melancholia, just as there are in plague or phthisis. For example, women patients will in frenzy speak openly of – matters – which in a cool and reasoned state would never pass their lips."

"Your experience with women appears vastly different from my own." The Crown Prince sounded amused. "Tell me more."

Ripley swallowed, repressing an annoyance it would be more than impolitic to express. He tried to think himself into the cool detachment of the lecture hall, recalling – as best he could – the words of Master Aelius, heard at the University in Glasstown many years ago, words which had shaped his path from that day forward.

"The divided mind rejects the possibility of madness even when acutely conscious of its pain. Accordingly, it is a curious, constant feature of such cases that the deluded woman creates for herself an external antagonist, clothing it in the name of father, brother, lord, priest – some embodiment of authority from within her immediate circle. That antagonist symbolises the dominance of unreason over her intellect, cloaking the woman's inner malady in an identifiable corporeal form. Typically, the patient breaks out into accusations of seduction and ravishment, supported with the most lurid and intimate details, the more convincing to others because she believe them so implicitly herself."

"And what about those women who have, in fact, been raped by their father, brother, lord, priest or whatever?" the Crown Prince enquired.

Ripley's brow creased. "Sir, what do you mean?"

"The question's simple enough. I wondered how you distinguished between women who are suffering distress following an actual rape and those whose delusions happen to take that form. Surely your treatment would be very different in each case?"

"I think, sir," Ripley said cautiously, "you may have mistaken my meaning. Criminal conduct is not an issue here. I'm simply describing a symptom – a delusion pervasive – almost universal – in such cases –"

The Crown Prince smiled, but something about his cold, pale eyes struck chill to the depths of Ripley's soul. The Queen had looked at him so, once, back in the first few days of treatment, when she was still agitated by his predecessor's regime of whippings and surprise icy-water drenchings. The next thing Ripley had known, he'd been struggling to break the grip of long-taloned fingers round his windpipe.

" _Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate._ Why not start from the principle that the woman might be telling the truth, rather than assuming she _must_ be lying and so being forced to construct your elaborate theories of the - divided mind – to account for it? Damn! Another pipe gone."

He looked down at the broken pieces with an almost comical air of affront. The servitor, whom Ripley had almost forgotten, must have been keeping a close eye on them. Bare moments later another pipe was being held out to the Crown Prince on a silver salver. He took it with an acknowledging quirk of his lips, lit it and leant back against the river wall.

Ripley's heart hammered. In his desperation, he blurted out the first thing that came into his head. "But, sir, how can such allegations be true? As I said, they are an almost universal feature of such cases. And there are so many cases!"

The Crown Prince sighed; the unmistakeable sound of a man losing patience with slower-witted folk around him.

"Everyone knows I and the King-my-brother have had our differences. The reasons for those – well. No matter." He gave a fleeting glance upwards, towards the windows of the Queen's suite, unmistakeable because of the bars across them. "Nevertheless, one thing we agree about – if not always for the same reasons – is that neither wealth, power nor sheer ingenuity must be permitted to impede the workings of the King's justice or challenge the rule of his law. As a result, I have acquired a remarkably detailed knowledge of crime. At least, as it is practised among the aristocracy of Gaaldine."

He paused for a moment, his smile grim. "Based on that knowledge, I'd wager that many of the women of whom you speak were telling the truth. Certainly the majority. Not inconceivably, all."

"But that's absurd! I know my patients. I'd have known –"

"Are you sure? Take, for example, Lady Louisa Elphinstone."

"What?" Ripley found himself leaning across the table, his weight supported on the palms of his hands. "Who betrayed her secret, sir? The family were adamant that no-one should know I had been consulted -"

"I'm not surprised. Some maladies do nothing for a young woman's prospects. Or those of the rest of their family."

Ripley gasped, but before he could say anything the Crown Prince extended a forefinger to brush the collar of chased gold links Ripley wore about his neck.

"That is by some distance the most valuable item you are wearing – I would guess, the most valuable item you possess."

His mouth grown suddenly dry, Ripley swallowed. "What of it, sir?"

"The style is a modern copy of the ancient gold-work found in the chambered tombs on the edge of the endless sea of grass that lies beyond the furthest borders of Gondal. The craftsmen in the city below Castle Elphinstone are famed for such work. It's wrought in gold of a distinctive red tint, which comes from a mine on Elphinstone land. The mine's output is limited and, therefore, reserved to the Elphinstone family and those whom they wish to honour. You could not have bought such a piece, even could you have afforded it. A gift from the family then; a very generous gift. A reward for a successful cure – or something else? The price of silence, perhaps?"

"Sir, I am an oath-sworn physician," Ripley said stiffly. "My silence cannot be bought. It comes as part of my calling."

"I suppose I asked for that." Ripley felt he detected a shade more warmth in the Crown Prince's tone. "A barrier, but we'll work round it. That is, I shall tell you what I surmise happened, and, if I appear about to slander someone too gratuitously, you may tell me I am mistaken. Other than that, I shall speak and you may remain silent. Does that chime with your physician's honour? Good."

He swung his booted feet up onto the stone table, leaned back against the river-wall, half-shuttered his eyes and took a long pull on his pipe. The evening had advanced; even at this short distance Ripley was barely able to make out the Crown Prince's face. He hoped the merciful dusk would veil his own expression, lest it make him unwittingly forsworn.

"Lady Louisa Elphinstone made her debut the season before last." The Crown Prince's voice was almost expressionless. "Very young – the dowagers tut-tutted, but acknowledged that since the Earl of Greengarth had four younger daughters waiting in line it made sense for him to bring the filly to the starting tape early – a direct quotation, by the way."

"I take your point, sir, about our different experiences of women," Ripley murmured.

"Yes. Her debut was not a success. She was, and I presume still is, a mousy little thing with very little conversation and the air of always looking over her shoulder, as if afraid of being watched. Which, of course, she was. No-one escapes scrutiny at Court."

Ripley bit his lip, remembering a girlish voice screaming on and on. _Get out of my presence. Get out. Don't stare at me. Why does everyone stare at me? Leave me alone._

"She left Court not half-way through the season, because, it was said, the family physician feared she was developing a congestion of the lungs and needed country air and complete rest to recover. Tongues wagged. The dowagers said they'd heard that one before."

"And you, sir?" Ripley ventured.

"I had no opinion on the matter. Not my sphere of influence; not unless it threatens the King's peace. Anthea would have let Mycroft know soon enough if she'd thought there was any risk of that. But I presume she went to some secluded manor on the Elphinstone estates, bore the child, that it was born dead, or became dead, or – in the happiest and least likely outcome – was handed over to foster parents ignorant of its true parentage."

 _My child is dead and I only want to die, too._ That frantic, remembered voice again.

"Became dead" had an ominous ring; it raised all sorts of possibilities which Ripley would prefer not to contemplate. Possibilities which chimed all too closely with the girl – scarcely more than a child herself – cowering on the bed, uttering animal-like whimpers.

"It died," Ripley said, the words passing his lips almost without his conscious will.

The Crown Prince nodded. "Always the most likely outcome. However, the Elphinstone family found themselves in a difficulty. Lady Louisa fell into a profound melancholia, interspersed with periods of frenzy in which she raved, her tongue unguarded. The dangers of some rumour leaking out – bearing in mind her four sisters still to make suitable matches – would have been at the forefront of their minds. So they called for you."

He paused, interrogatively. Ripley said nothing. After a moment, the Crown Prince resumed.

"You would have to be told about the child, of course; it would instantly be clear to you on any physical examination that Lady Louisa had recently given birth, to say nothing of what she might let slip in her fits of frenzy. The father – let's see. You were told that a member of the household – Lady Louisa's music tutor, let's say, or – no – drawing master (her sketching was marginally less execrable than her playing) – had abused his position of trust, seduced her affections and violated her innocence. They told you he had been confronted with the evidence of his guilt and, overwhelmed by the enormity of his conduct, committed suicide. You did not believe the suicide story."

"I didn't?" Ripley enquired, trying to infuse his voice with a sardonic note, his mind running once more on sorcery. It had been the dancing master, as a matter of fact, but in every other respect the Crown Prince's account was as accurate as if he had been there.

The Crown Prince shook his head. "No. But my brother's edicts against duelling are strict and enforced with an impartial hand. As a physician, you deplored the senseless waste of human life; as a compassionate man, you felt for a father driven to avenge his daughter's virtue on the field of honour."

 _Uncle, actually. He was younger and the better swordsman. But how does he do this?_

"As I said, my knowledge of Gaaldine's aristocracy is enormous. And, for the most part, they could not be accused of taxing anyone's imagination when it comes to either their crimes or their cover stories." Once again, the Crown Prince read his thoughts with ease.

His voice changed. "You heard a different story from Lady Louisa's lips – at least, when the paroxysm was on her. When calmer, she said nothing at all of the matter which had brought her to this pass. But in frenzy – she fell into the classic pattern you described so eloquently a few moments ago. And the man she named as her violator was not a music tutor or a drawing master. Nor could what happened be dignified by the title of 'seduction'. And – very much more to the point – whether by his own hand or on the field of honour, the man in question was not dead. He was, in fact, paying your substantial fees."

Ripley found his breath catch in his throat, almost as if he was battling through a smoke-filled room. He could not have spoken even if he would. The Crown Prince pressed inexorably on.

"That scandal had long since died down – out of sight, out of mind is never more true than at Court – when the King-my-brother summoned me in March of this year to a private conference. A marriage alliance was being proposed which gave him considerable unease. The de Mervilles had lands, political patronage and influence; the Elphinstones possessed mining and mineral interests second to none in the realm, to say nothing of controlling an important port city. Neither house had shown itself especially loyal to the Crown. An alliance between the two of them should be discouraged at all costs."

"Your task was to prevent the match, sir?"

"If humanly possible. All the King had tried through conventional means had failed, but there remained one tiny glimmer of hope – no brighter than a candle-flame in a storm. The intended bride's mother was vehemently opposed to her daughter marrying the Earl of Greengarth – she was an age to remember him from her own court debut – and petitioned the King to use all his influence to ensure the match did not take place."

"Petitioned the King? But what of her husband – the girl herself –?"

"Her husband was prepared to overlook a great deal for the chance of obtaining a familial interest in Gaaldine's principal deep-water port. The girl, dazzled by the prospect of becoming a Countess in her own right, was deaf to the dangers of entering into a marriage with a widower thirty years her senior and acquiring, in the process, a large family of step-children, the eldest, Lady Louisa, less than two years younger than herself. You said something?"

Ripley shook his head vigorously. "Proceed, sir. What did the King hope you might do?"

"Well, initially, that I might be able deter the girl by proving to her that the Earl had murdered his first wife. Hopeless."

"The Earl was innocent?"

The Crown Prince snorted. "Of course not. But all the evidence that he'd contrived that landslip in the Spungen Pass was buried beneath tons of rock and earth, along with his late Countess, her personal escort and a quite extraordinary quantity of mules. I presented Miss de Merville with all the facts – I argued, I pleaded, and I got _nowhere._ Compared to the prospect of a Countess's coronet, the fact that she'd most probably be wearing a shroud if she didn't produce a male heir in the next five years made no impression on her at all. It was if I was speaking Hebrew."

"So what did you do, sir?"

"I learned – the means don't matter here – that the Earl kept a journal – heavily guarded and written in code. There was, my informant assured me, no deed too vile for the Earl not to have confided it to his private diary. Working only with a single confidant – a man of unexampled courage – I used a subterfuge to gain access to the Earl's private apartments. I found the diary, though the search took longer than I had hoped, and the Earl's armsmen found me there before I could make good my escape. If Jo- if my friend hadn't become alarmed and – against my express orders – returned to find me, they'd have killed me on the spot. Which would, of course, have seen the entire Elphinstone family arraigned for treason and their estates forfeit to the Crown, but wouldn't have done me much good. But we fought our way out, somehow, and I managed to keep hold of the journal."

"So you took it to Miss de Merville?"

"Oh, no. Once I'd decoded it – a relatively trivial exercise – I waited until the Earl next attended on my brother, and intercepted him as he was leaving the audience chamber. I made him privy to certain facts that I could only have known had I read his diary. I told him that I expected him to go into voluntary exile that night, leaving behind a letter confessing to his involvement in the continuing peculation scandal, or it would be the block or, quite possibly, the stake and that his name would live as a fireside bogey for centuries to come. He realised he had no choice." A grim humour infused the Crown Prince's voice. "Unfortunately for the Earl, the lady who'd put me onto the existence of the Earl's diary was less prepared than I to allow him such a light escape. She'd witnessed him arrive at Court and, as he left, sprang out and flung oil of vitriol in his face."

Ripley had seen the results of vitriol-throwing before, years ago, when he'd been starting out as a physician. Jealous rows between whores, family feuds gone inconceivably bitter, jilted lovers – vitriol was too easy to obtain and its effects so horrific, he often thought they corroded the thrower internally as much as they disfigured the victim externally.

In most cases. But now his mind went back to that hunched, withdrawn figure in a room in a remote farmhouse in the distant reaches of the Elphinstone estates and, just for a moment, Ripley thought he could have flung the acid himself.

"The Earl, as you know, was a heavy man, out of training. The shock and the pain brought on an apoplectic seizure and, though he lingered a week or so, he died without regaining consciousness and without, therefore, making a final confession."

 _Let him rot in Hell._ "I take it the diary vindicated Lady Louisa's account?"

"Oh, most clearly. Her honesty and her courage, both. She had, you see, threatened her father that if he turned his unnatural lusts onto her sisters – as she feared (with good reason) he might, she would lay the whole story before the King. Hence his anxiety to ensure that any such story would be pre-emptively disbelieved. You've made no secret, Master Ripley, of your adherence to the teachings of Master Aelius. His theory of the divided mind no doubt seemed to the Earl the very thing to cloak his villainy."

The blessed darkness – the glow of the Crown Prince's pipe the only light – cloaked Ripley's burning features. "Holy Mary, he duped me."

"He intended so. But in the process, he would seem to have inadvertently employed an honest man. And a good physician, I judge – you're not the first or the last to have made a diagnosis in advance of a crucial piece of data. And, whether your theory was right or not, your practice seems to have been sound. I understand Lady Louisa has recently been admitted as a postulant at the Abbey of Norburyness. The Abbess tells me she is doing well; that she has a particular affinity with Infirmary work. And that she rarely has nightmares these days. I'd not give in to that impulse to throw your chain in the river, Master Ripley. It was fairly earned."

Ripley inhaled; he fancied the air had the tang of smoke, as if from burnt boats. Whatever happened now, he was no longer the physician who had stepped onto the river terrace, condescending to share a little of the mystery of his calling with a distinguished guest.

"So, now," the Crown Prince said, "having established that I ask this question as the King's lieutenant, charged with a roving commission to investigate crime, specifically any constituting threats to our House and to the safety of this realm, whom did my sister Genia name as her attacker?"

"I –ah – "

"Don't think I'm not prepared to ask Genia herself, should the need arise. But I hope I've shown you I am not asking you about a symptom of my sister's malady – which you would, quite properly, as her physician refuse to discuss with me – but a crime committed against my sister's person, such crime being – given she is Queen consort of Gaaldine – treason in the highest degree. And I am sure I need not warn you what happens to those who wilfully conceal their knowledge of treason, or who refuse to answer when a direct question about treasonous acts is put to them."

Ripley grasped the edge of the table, fighting the urge to laugh, hysterically. For all the Crown Prince's demonstrated acuity there was one thing, it seemed, he did not know and could not deduce.

"Not treason, sir," he said, when he had brought his voice under a semblance of control. "For, after all, there is one man in all the realm against whom a charge of treason may never be brought. The King himself."

He had fancied the Crown Prince a hunting wildcat before, when he'd first seen him in trooper's gear and the dust of the road. Now he was a black, whirling, velvet blur against the charcoal background of the dusk-shrouded riverbank, his pipe flung down to shatter into shards on the terrace floor as he reached inside his doublet for a dagger (and, dear God, what did it say about the man that he wore concealed weaponry even to an after-dinner pipe or three on the terrace?), spitting out "Mycroft!" as if it was the worst obscenity in all the tongues the Earth knew or ever had known.

On the edge of his vision Ripley glimpsed the servitor pressing himself back into the lighted archway of the Residence, looking anywhere but at them, no doubt rehearsing his story in his head already: "I saw nothing; I had gone to fetch more brandy; by the time I returned it was all over."

But Ripley was – if he said so himself (and none of his jealous professional brethren would be likely to do him the favour) – the best physician in the three kingdoms when it came to frenzy. He had faced down the Queen when she'd been swinging a kitchen cleaver, to say nothing of countless lesser threats over the years. He had no trouble in summoning the right note of authority into his voice.

"Sir, hear me out. You mistake my meaning. I made no reference to the King your brother. When I mentioned the King, it was your late grandfather I meant, sir."

The Crown Prince flopped back onto the bench like a puppet whose handler has dropped the strings. "Dear God," he murmured, barely louder than a breath. " _Then_. When I was away in Gondal."

"Sir?"

"You say my grandfather forced my sister?" The Crown Prince's voice had a wild edge, a note Ripley was used to hearing, but not from the relatives of his patients. He maintained the same tone of controlled authority.

"So she told me, sir, in a moment of extreme distress. For the reasons I mentioned, I was disinclined to take her claim literally at the time."

"You should have done. Genia almost never softens the stark truth. You can imagine how popular it made her at Court. But why – oh. Of course. The boys. That's why the old bastard did it. And why Genia didn't tell anyone in the family."

"Sir?"

"The King-my-grandfather –" the Crown Prince almost spat the words, "forced my brother to marry Genia at a time when he had sent me to Gondal as a hostage under a peace treaty which he was already making active preparations to break. No wonder he felt the need to secure the succession, given that he knew – if no-one else did – that he had almost certainly sent me to my death. Once the twins were born, nothing stood between him and the invasion of Gondal."

Ripley reeled. No-one, he remembered, had grieved much for the death of the old King, though his lacklustre, middle-aged son, the Crown Prince's uncle, grey and apparently overburdened by his coronation robes, had seemed less like the harbinger of a new era than an inexplicable leftover from the last. But the weight of evil which the last few minutes had revealed – Holy Mary, he was less surprised by the Queen's malady than by the puzzle of how any of the family had survived with their reason intact.

He almost asked the question, throwing aside all questions of royal protocol. At that moment the Crown Prince threw his head back, as if sniffing the wind. He sprang to his feet.

"Bring torches." Servitors rushed to obey. By the flickering light Ripley saw the man the Crown Prince had spotted, weaving erratically along the river-bank, spent with exhaustion. The Crown Prince placed both palms on the wall, vaulted over and dropped lightly down on the far side. He caught the man just as his stumble would have sent him into the river and looked up at Ripley.

"It's my perimeter guard from the eastward approaches. He's taken an arrow to his shoulder. Make yourself ready to extract it. And tell the Queen's guard captain and my own to attend us at once, so they hear him can tell us how he got it. Come on, man. I've got you. Bear up. Only a few steps more."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> " _Dove è da notare che queste simili morti, le quali seguando per deliberazione d'uno animo ostinato, sono da' principi inevitabili, perché ciascuno che non si curi di moriri lo può offendere_ And here we must note that such-like deaths, which are deliberately inflicted with a resolved and desperate courage, cannot be avoided by princes, because any one who does not fear to die can inflict them. (Machiavelli on suicide bombers, _The Prince_ ch. XIX)  
>  _Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate._ "Extra explanations shouldn't be posited unless you have to. " William of Occam. A rather more reliable way of approaching a logical puzzle than "When you have eliminated the impossible…"
> 
> Ripley's treatment of mental illness is significantly ahead of his time on a number of counts. The theory of "the divided mind" echoes Freud's later writings, when he produced an entire theory of female sexuality posited on the notion that there couldn't really be as much incest in 19th century Vienna as his patients kept telling him there was. His routine of open-air manual labour derives from Willis' treatment of George III.


	4. Chapter 4

Unlike some of his contemporaries at the University, Ripley had never found himself having to dabble in surgery to make ends meet; in accordance with his Hippocratic Oath he'd been able to leave all that sort of thing to those who specialised in it. Now he looked at the well-worn arrow-extraction pliers from the guard captain's field-chest and mentally ran through a hastily revised page from a textbook ("Dilate the entrance wound; crush the blades of the arrow-head or shield it with a split reed _in situ_ ; withdraw with a swift but steady hand.")

The door opened to admit the Queen, her braided hair piled in a coronet on top of her head.

"Ma'am," Ripley protested.

Her face was pale but her tone composed. "What? You'll need an orderly, the guard captains can't be spared, it would be unwise to admit anyone else to the Council and I'm better than Sherlock at doing two things at once."

Whether at the realisation he was about to be ministered to by his Queen or that the next few minutes were likely to entail considerable pain, the soldier squeaked. The Queen glanced down to where he lay on the couch.

"Bear up, man. Would you prefer me to administer brandy or tincture of opium, Master Ripley, to dull the pain?"

 _All poisons must be locked securely away from the Queen's grace lest she misuse them_ , a note from that sheaf of papers reminded him.

"Opium," he said decisively, and passed her the dropper and the phial. She mixed a stiff dose with water, and administered it.

The door swung open again. The Crown Prince entered, flanked by the two guard captains. He showed no surprise at the Queen's presence, merely moving round to the other side of the couch, picking up the soldier's good hand and holding it in his.

"So, repeat what you told me a few minutes ago, so the commanders can hear. How long until the sea-wolves reach here?"

The soldier gaped, then muttered, "Two turns of the glass. Three, at a stretch. Depends how long it takes 'em to reduce the lower dale. Burning and killing all in their path. Didn' want anyone to raise alarm or bar retreat to their ships."

"The main road's cut and held in both directions? You suppose them to have burnt the nearest semaphore station?"

"Sawt smoke," the soldier said hoarsely. "Caught poor buggers at their evening meal, most like. Treacherous fucking sea-scum. My pardon, m'lady."

The Queen snorted. "Don't spare my sensibilities. I shared a nursery with your commander; I've heard worse than that. Master Ripley. Start the extraction, or my brother will exhaust your patient with questioning."

Thus exhorted, Ripley sighted down the arrow shaft in an effort to gauge the lie of the head, and widened the entry wound a little. The soldier gasped and turned his head away, towards the Crown Prince, his eyes dulled with the opium and with pain. The Crown Prince's voice stayed as level as if he were taking a routine report from a watch captain.

"This is no casual sea-wolf raid. There's a mind behind it, subtle and malicious. My presence here is by the merest happenstance; this is directed at the Queen's person. So, captain, how may we defend the Queen?"

Ripley knew the answer before he saw the garrison commander shake his head. The Residence was a dower property on the furthest fringes of the Alwent estates; a suitable resting place for dowager Countesses or, as here, a sister of the Earl estranged both from her husband and her right mind. No-one had ever intended it as a defensible stronghold; it had no strategic advantages. Beyond the Residence the riverside road dwindled to a goat-path, the dale turned to rock and moorland and ended in the blind wall of Alwentfell's impassable crags.

"We cannot hold the Residence," the captain said. "Though, if it be your orders, your grace, we will expend our last drop of blood in attempting it."

"The point of that being?" the Queen enquired. "Master Ripley, if we are all to die in the next three hours, could we at least ensure that your patient dies from enemy action rather than his friends' inaction? The pliers, swiftly."

Ripley swallowed the retort that he expected his orderlies to carry out his instructions, not _vice versa_. In one swift, assured move, he inserted the pliers into the dilated wound, probing for the arrowhead as if the pliers truly were the extensions of his finger ends. The soldier emitted a sharp, keening gasp and gripped the Crown Prince's hand so tightly Ripley wondered if he might end up with two patients rather than one.

There, he had it. Ripley cradled the arrow head between the hollowed out jaws of the pliers, and squeezed the handles hard, feeling the blades fold beneath the pressure. With a brief stab of almost unbearable triumph he drew the arrow smoothly out down the same path along which it had entered. Dark blood followed, but slowed to a trickle as the Queen staunched it with sea-sponges and sphagnum moss. He had missed, thank the Holy Virgin, any of the major blood vessels.

Almost before the arrow was out of the wound the Crown Prince was reaching for it.  
"Gondalian broad-head. Royal armoury stamp. Style of thirty years ago but near mint condition. Some master of the armouries with an itchy palm and a sea-wolf captain with some very unexpected connections." He broke off the shaft close to the head and tucked the arrowhead inside his doublet. "Mycroft's people would be interested in this, if I can contrive some way of it reaching them."

The Queen caught at his arm. "Take it with you. Whatever it takes, the raiders must not find you here. _At all costs_ , Sherlock. _All costs._ "

"Finish the bandaging, Ripley," the Crown Prince said. "I need to talk with my sister."

Ripley's face flamed at the casual dismissal before common-sense reasserted itself. If the crisis at hand had, for the moment, drawn the Queen out of the dark shadows that clouded her wits and made a horror of her waking hours, then it was a medical miracle. It might, at least, allow her to make her peace with God and with her family before the raiders arrived and they all had to die.

The two of them withdrew into a corner of the room where, judging by their gestures and the high spots of colour on their cheek-bones, they were having a furious argument, though the few words which were audible sounded like nonsense syllables.

 _A nursery code, so the grown-ups can't understand._

Another piece of the puzzle, slotting into place when it could do no conceivable good.

Across the room, the two garrison commanders were having their own, low-voiced conversation, of which Ripley heard snatches as he stitched and bandaged the wound. "Seventy souls in the Residence. Less than half of those fighting men. What? No. Ceremonial only. Scarce able to send a ball fifty yards. The scullery lads might get through, but will the adjoining dales rise on their say-so? The raiders may strike their farmsteads next; they'll be looking to protect their own livestock and women. And what about the Crown Prince?"

"What about me?" The argument between the Queen and the Crown Prince had ended; from their equally tight, tense expressions it was impossible to tell who had won it.

The two guard captains looked at each other; neither seemed anxious to be the first to speak.

"Sherlock." The characteristic weariness had returned to the Queen's voice. "Put the poor men out of their misery. We all know that every single person in the Residence is more expendable than you. Don't make them say it."

"You are not expendable, Genia."

She snorted. "Don't be absurd. Most aristocrats in Gaaldine with marriageable daughters would put money on my expendability. Two of my guard captains have vanished, suddenly, during the time I've been here. No-one mentioned their names again. They failed one of your tests, I take it."

The Crown Prince made a small, exasperated noise in his throat. "That is hardly the point. I cannot stand here and let you –"

"Sherlock, you have no authority over me, and – to the extent you borrow any from your brother – the King surrendered any right to compel my allegiance long ago. If I acknowledge any liege, it's the Princess Royal. And your mother told me to protect you. Have you heard her tell me the job is finished? Because I haven't."

Dead silence fell on the room. The Crown Prince was white to the lips. He turned, savagely, towards the garrison commander.

"So, how much powder and shot do we have, anyway?"

The garrison commander pulled out a clay tablet. "Three barrels of powder for hunting and target practice. And a couple more that were earmarked for fireworks, for the King's birthday."

"You celebrate Mycroft's birthday?" The Crown Prince's brows almost reached his hairline.

"I cause things to be blown up on Mycroft's birthday. The local people seem to enjoy it."

The garrison commander coughed. "Irrespective of the reason we have the powder, sir, we can do little with it. The only piece of ordnance we have is for ceremonial purposes. We can do what we can to hold for a short time, but there is no readily defensible position here."

The Crown Prince's captain nodded. `'Sir, if I may speak frankly, once it comes to close quarters – which it will do – I hold out very little hope we will prevail. You must take the Queen and go up the dale-side. "

"No." The Queen's eyes were wide silver fires blazing beneath her thick black brows. "I do not leave the Residence. I stay with my children."

Ripley raised his hand to rest on the Queen's arm. "Ma'am, you must recall that the Princes are –"

He paused, the eyes of the captains on him, warning him not to utter the unutterable.

"Dead?" she snapped. "A distinction of very little merit. But, dead or not, my boys and I are Gaaldine's past. The Crown Prince and his Charis are the future – of Gondal as much as Gaaldine. This raid, my brother says, has a mind of subtle malice behind it. Do any of us doubt whose mind that is? What's the name of the garden boy with the chipped front tooth and the off-key whistle?"

The garrison commander's eyes flickered desperately towards the Crown Prince, who was leaning against the wall, his arms folded, clearly not in the least minded to intervene.

"Albert, ma'am."

"Bring him here at once."

"Your grace –"

"Obey your Queen's command." The Crown Prince's tone sharpened. "And let her waiting woman in, while you're at it. It's more comfortable for her than listening through the keyhole. Stone floors are very chilling. She doesn't want cramp in legs she'll shortly need to run for her life."

The garrison commander took two strides to the door and flung it wide. Lisbet fell sprawling across the threshold. As he bent to pluck her to her feet she twisted to look straight at the Crown Prince.

"I don't run. Where my lady goes, I go."

"And where she dies, you will die, and there you will be buried?" the Crown Prince enquired. Lisbet gave a sharp, defiant nod.

"Yes. Your grace." She crossed the room to stand a little behind the Queen's left shoulder.

The Queen's hand reached out to grasp hers. "Thank you."

The door swung open again and a young lout – Ripley supposed he must have seen him about the place, but had absolutely no recollection of his face – was thrust in by the garrison commander.

"Albert, ma'am," he announced.

"Ah, good." The Queen fixed the young man with an intense gaze; he took an involuntary half-step backwards. "No, don't be alarmed, young man. You're seeing a girl in Ulvastdale. Secretly. Her family don't approve; she's married or pledged to another."

Albert turned beetroot-red. "Who snitched on me?"

"Who snitched on me _your grace_ ," Lisbet corrected. "And you address the Queen as 'ma'am' after that." Ripley thought he saw a flicker of malicious amusement cross the Crown Prince's face.

"No-one – snitched. I rarely sleep and I have exceptionally acute hearing. On the night of the last full moon I heard someone walking along the terrace below my window whistling 'The lay of Ulvast's maid.' Off-key. I looked out of my window to see this young man, with a coil of rope around his body, heading towards the back of the Residence. I didn't suppose the guards would have let someone through just like that, but I did wonder how long it would take them to notice if they had – "

"Why didn't you raise the alarm, ma'am?" The garrison commander had white showing all around his eyes.

The Queen shrugged. "I get so bored when I can't sleep. It seemed more interesting to let things happen."

A small bubbling sound came from the corner of the room. The Crown Prince seemed to be finding the situation strangely funny.

"What's my girl got to do with you – ma'am?" Both the garrison commanders and Lisbet glared at Albert, but the Queen smiled.

"There's a secret way over Alwentfell, isn't there? You couldn't have been there and back the long way round before moonset, and there was the rope, too."

"And if there is? Ma'am."

"Go now. Take my brother. There are sea-wolves coming up the valley. They must not find the Crown Prince. Everyone knows the valley ends in a blind wall. Lead my brother by your secret way into Ulvastdale, and let him raise a force to cut off the sea-wolves from their ships."

The garrison commander nodded. "Yes. That might work. But, can't Albert take you too, ma'am?"

She snorted. "We have already dealt with that. No. Albert, take Sherlock. And Master Ripley. "

The words hit him like a blow. "What? But my duty lies with you!"

"I release you from it."

"Your grace, you cannot do that. I am appointed by your husband –"

"And, as the Queen pointed out a few moments ago, I am the King's lieutenant." The Crown Prince's smile was as sharp and threatening as a poignard. "Between the Queen and I, there's sufficient authority in this room to decree an invasion of Gondal, should we so choose. Certainly to – reassign you to different duties."

"It's madness for her to remain here."

If the Crown Prince's smile was a dagger, the Queen's was a ravening wolf. "I note, Master Ripley, that you are not raising that allegation against any of my guard. Or the Crown Prince's."

"That's different –"

"In this particular case, it is not. We are each of us called to stand in the place to which duty bids us. My duty to the Royal House of Gaaldine has taken me into far darker places than this, Master Ripley."

He thought of the old King, and the words choked in his throat.

"The sea-wolves are not going to pass up such an excellent ransom opportunity as that afforded by the Queen's person. However, a kidnapping requires far more intensive resources than an assassination," the Crown Prince observed. "For as long as the sea-wolves believe the Queen to be within the Residence, the more time the non-combatants have to scatter into the woods. On which point –"

He turned to the wounded soldier, who had struggled into a sitting position on the couch, and looked as if he was deeply regretting it.

"Take this." The Crown Prince handed him a small leather pouch. "Chew the leaves slowly. They're shipped from the Americas and gold leaf's less costly, weight for weight. That should buy you another day on your feet. But you'll drop like a stone at the end."

"Sir!" A howl of sheer outrage stormed out of Ripley's throat. "That's a severely injured man!"

"Which is why I'm assigning him to the light duties of supervising the evacuation of the non-combatants." He turned back to the soldier. "You were in the retreat from Vannstown, weren't you?"

The soldier groaned. "You know I was, sir. And – permission to speak freely – a right royal bloody fuck-up that were, too. Sir."

The Crown Prince dropped to his haunches besides the couch. "I'm relying on you to do better this time. There's clean water running down the dale-side but people should take skins to gather it in. Decent footwear, warm clothes and food. And weapons. Plenty of cleavers in the kitchens. Let it be known the Crown will pay a fifty thaler bonus on every confirmed sea-wolf kill. Best to take ears. And warn 'em I'm more than capable of identifying a matched pair."

"Understood, sir." The soldier managed a shaky salute, and an even shakier grin. "I'd best be off. Good luck, sir."

"And you, Jonathan."

The soldier saluted – awkwardly, using the wrong hand – and left.

"What now, sir?" Ripley asked.

"Watch, and listen. "

The Crown Prince dropped to his knees before the Queen, placing his large hands between her much smaller ones.

"By the authority vested in me as the King's lieutenant of Gaaldine and in right of the true Queen of Gondal, being her consort and de iure champion, by this my act, word and solemn pledge, being in – we'd better leave that bit out to be on the safe side – being of full age and acting of my own free will, I do vest in you command of all troops at my immediate disposal together with the power to impress into your service all such citizens and residents of the realm as you deem expedient, in the defence of Alwentdale and in such offensive stratagems and devices as to you seem fit in your sole discretion, you being answerable to none for your actions save God alone."

He rose and kissed the Queen on her cheek. "Get as many of them out as you can, Genia." He paused, then reached inside his doublet. "I had almost forgot. I was to give you this."

A small velvet bag. Hard to tell with the other smells in the room, but Ripley thought a faint, clean, floral scent came from it.

The Queen took it. Her expression changed; for a moment Ripley almost thought the eerie composure of the last minutes might crack at last. She went up on tiptoe to whisper in the Crown Prince's ear.

He nodded. "Genia, trust me. If I can contrive it, I will. Ripley, Albert. At the guardhouse within a quarter turn of the glass, equipped and provisioned for a tough march. Lisbet, gentlemen. God speed you all."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone actually reading the Hippocratic Oath will note that it contains about two-thirds ethics and one third restrictive trades practices. The pledge "not to cut, even for the stone, and to leave this to those trained in such matters" does indeed appear there, reinforcing contemporary distinctions between doctors and surgeons.


	5. Chapter 5

The sounds of fighting were getting fainter; the defenders mostly dead or fled for the woods. A ragged chorus of singing arose from the rear of the great house – the men must have found the kitchens and, with them, the cellars.

Douglas damned Johnson's eyes for not keeping them in hand before recalling his first mate was dead; killed in the frantic melee before the gatehouse.

No matter. They would sober up on the long march back to the ships. No-one would trouble them; the villages and hamlets along the lower dale had been systematically burned and despoiled, their inhabitants massacred. Once he had secured his prize they would be off before anyone knew they had been here; certainly before any resistance could be mustered.

Douglas put his foot incautiously on a patch of drying blood at the stair head, almost fell, and cursed. Blood. Here. Someone had been up here ahead of him. Someone – despite his express _order_ – had made a break for the upper regions, tried to get to the Queen first, tried to get her away, aiming to take Douglas' prize, rob him of his promised reward –

Not that he should have been put in this position in the first place; he, a Douglas, being forced to bargain for permission to return to Court, haggle like any market tradesman for what should have been his by right. Lesser men – that arrogant, lily-skinned pretty-boy Rupert, black-browed Sebastian, all the veterans of the Heir's very _private_ entertainments at the Castle – had been back carousing in the capital before King Ambrosine's funeral choir had finishing singing the _Dies Irae._

All this unnecessary humiliation – as if the fact that he, unlike those others, had been formally exiled should have been allowed to matter at all, when King James could have reversed his predecessor's decision with a couple of scrapes on ink on a piece of paper, less trouble than selecting the royal breakfast or ordering a groom flogged.

It wasn't even as if such an act was anything other than a plain righting of one of the last reign's numerous wrongs. Everyone who mattered knew him the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Nobody should have subjected him to the humiliation of a public enquiry, nobody should have interfered with the harsh, necessary discipline of a naval dockyard, started to ask for log records and muster rolls, expressed hypocritical, manufactured outrage at the fates of a few matelots, wharf-rats, the sweepings of the waterfronts, destroyed his life over those nonentities, those irrelevancies.

Nobody except a little surgeon-general, not even a career soldier, promoted above the heads of better men for boudoir swordsmanship, deputising in bed for an impotent King.

When he carried the Queen-consort of Gaaldine back to the Court of Gondal as a hostage, perhaps Douglas could persuade King James to insist that John Watson led the negotiation team to get her back. He'd know, of course, that he would be a dead man the instant he crossed the border, one way or the other, but that wouldn't stop Watson, not with his numb-brained notions of honour, if his presence might add a feather-weight on the side of the mad Queen's safety.

Yes. That would be the best revenge. And the key to all of it was just feet away.

"Stop right there." The growl from the dark of the passage had a tell-tale break in it. Someone badly wounded and at the end of his endurance.

"I've come for the Queen," Douglas said, conversationally. "Want to make it easy or hard, soldier?"

"I –"

Whatever words the unseen defender had been about to choke out were lost; the door to the Queen's apartments was flung wide. The blaze of light from the room inside almost dazzled him for a moment.

"You will be the commander of the opposing force," a low, musical voice said. "The Queen's grace is ready to receive you."

Douglas blinked several times until his vision cleared. The girl who stood in the archway wore a white silk gown in the archaic Court style, its deep scooped neckline skimming so low that Douglas could glimpse the top of the dark areoles of her nipples. A sharp, hot spike of lust hit him. The Queen was to be rendered untouched to Gondal, not that that would be a problem; their spies had reported she looked decades older than her forty years, crazed and skinny with unkempt hair and bare feet, moving through the house like a revenant in a clowder of cats.

This girl, though was a prize of war, his own private prize. No reason to tell her so now. She would discover it soon enough. He bowed, feeling old Court habits sliding back around him like a familiar, well-worn cloak.

"Tell her grace I am honoured by the privilege of an audience with her."

The girl drew back, motioning him across the threshold. The door whispered shut behind him. He looked around with interest.

Beeswax candles in silver sconces blazed on every flat surface. The room was sparsely but handsomely furnished with heavy carved furniture in dark, foreign woods. A richly embroidered tapestry, depicting the chase and capture of a unicorn, curtained a niche to the left of the door, closing it off entirely from the main room. Some personal shrine, presumably. In the corner of the room a lit brazier breathed out the heady, aromatic fumes of some exotic gum or resin.

"It is the Queen's pleasure that you take wine with her," the girl said, plucking at his sleeve and leading him towards one of the two throne-like chairs positioned on either side of the cold hearth. She gestured towards a crystal decanter three-quarters full and to the glasses beside it.

Douglas smiled. A transparent device, of course, but one had to admire the girl's spirit for trying it. He settled himself in the nearer chair, crossing his booted ankles.

"The Queen's hospitality overwhelms me, but I regret it is quite out of my power to accept. We have a long journey ahead of us tonight, and I shall need to keep a clear head. Now, where is the Queen?"

"That would be me."

The unicorn tapestry twitched aside, and a slender figure stepped out into the room, her hair unbound, a rippling dark curtain round her shoulders and down her back. Her dress was of the same style as the girl's, but far more elaborate; covered in delicate, dancing patterns worked in seed-pearls and crystals. It would not have been out of place on a royal bride going to the altar.

The girl filled a wine-glass, and brought it to her, dipping her knee as she proffered it.

"Thank you, Lisbet. Now, open the blinds. I would see the stars."

Douglas tensed, then relaxed. A madwoman's chambers. Bars across the window. No escape there.

She turned to face him. "You have entered Alwentdale under arms, killed my liege-people, destroyed their homes. It ends here. Look to the unicorn."

"What the –"

The tapestry bellied out from the niche and his world came down in ruin about his ears.

………

"Dear God!"

The blast hit them like a wall of solid air; followed a second of so later by a thunder roll which reverberated off the cliff faces as though it would tear the mountain apart. They turned and looked down the valley towards the Residence. A great bloom of flame was rising into the night sky. By its glow they could see tiny figures running like ants.

"Stage one of a two –" Another bloom of flame, followed a split second later by another thunder-roll. The Crown Prince caught Ripley's arm. "Look to the gate-house. Start counting. One coronet, two coronet, three coronet…"

He had reached thirteen when, with a force which seemed double that of the previous explosion, the gate-house went up in blue and orange flames.

"Hah! A _three_ stage explosion."

"But how did she contrive it, with so little gunpowder?"

The Crown Prince stood for a moment, looking down at the blazing wreckage of the Residence. "Before she was the mad Queen of Gaaldine, she was my mad cousin Genia. She always liked explosions. She taught me to make gunpowder when I was nine years old. And there was oil, brandy and flour in the Residence as well as powder. For her, it would have sufficed. Come. She's bought us time to raise Ulvastdale and trap the remnants of the sea-wolves between our forces and the wreckage of their burning boats. Let's not waste it."

**Author's Note:**

> A downloadable ebook version of this is available [ here ](http://ajhall.shoesforindustry.net/ebooks/37/ajhall_queens_gambit/)


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